Archive for recommendations

I’m going to have some time to read over my Christmas holiday, so I went through my wishlist and downloaded a whole slew of samples (see below). I will report back once I get through them all! In the meantime, if you have read any of these books and either loved or hated them, feel free to let me know in comments.

I can no longer remember who recommended most of these to me. All of the authors are new to me except for Daniel José Older and Kate Elliott.

Fiction:Lone Wolf (Bluewater Bay Book 4) by Aleksandr Voinov and L.A. Witt is a male/male romance. I’d read one book previously in this series, which focuses on the creative personalities surrounding a series of werewolf books and the television series that follows (based on the two I’ve read!). This was the werewolf series author’s book, and it was great fun for me in particular because aside from the romance, it was all about fandom! And writing! The author, to relax, hangs out anonymously on a forum for his series, and is careful to never, ever read the fanfiction, except by one guy who is his chat buddy, because he just can’t stop reading it; he’s even read some of his buddy’s slash and thinks it is delicious. And then chat buddy has a novel, which has the solution to author’s problem of being horribly stuck on book eight, and then it heads directly into “this is the awesomest fantasy ever, do not pass go, but do collect your several million dollars.” I will admit to skimming over most of the erotic scenes to get to more stuff about the awesome deal the two writers got with the publisher, and the writer mentoring, and the convention, and all that. There was a romance, and some conflict, but whatever. Fandom! Fanfiction! Awesome publishing deal and vast amount of editing that works out perfectly! That’s the real fantasy.

The original author (Hunter) is a silver fox in his 40s. Chat buddy author (Kevyan) is in his mid-twenties, is Syrian/Italian, and has adorable geek glasses; a tiny bit of plot happens related to his ethnicity and name. There’s some discussion of panic attacks and near-panic attacks, if that’s an issue for you.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik is a first-person fantasy novel with Polish folklore for underpinnings. I really, really enjoyed it; I stayed up late two nights in a row to finish it. The heroine, who never felt she was as special as her best friend, turns out to have amazing magic, but that does not make her life easy in the least. Sometimes, it makes it worse. I felt Novik handled that trope brilliantly. It’s a pageturner not only because the narrator is so engaging, but because things keep getting worse in more and more interesting, unexpected ways. Also, I really loved the creativity and realistic feel of the magic system.

A Gentleman’s Game: A Queen & Country Novel by Greg Rucka was essentially a modern-day Bond novel. The protagonist, Tara Chace, is, well, Bondish, though unlike a Bond novel, the antagonists have some point of view sections to demonstrate that they are antagonists rather than cartoonish villains. I probably won’t read another one of these, but it kept me involved, mostly through resonance with real-world events.

The Bride Wore Size 12 (Heather Wells Mysteries Book 5) by Meg Cabot has a breezy, first-person tone. It’s set at the fictional New York College and involves a murder in the residence hall where Heather, a former teen pop star, works, linked to another mystery I won’t spoil here. This author is light reading for me; I read it while home sick. I think I might have missed book four.

Second Position by Katherine Locke is all about recovery from trauma. I read it because I recently met the author, and because I like romances about performers. It’s a New Adult romance about ballet dancers reconnecting years after a terrible car accident caused the male protagonist (Zed) to have his leg amputated and the female protagonist (Aly) to miscarry their child. Aly continues dancing professionally while dealing with anxiety, depression, and anorexia; Zed is in recovery from alcoholism and teaches music and drama to high school students. The characters were complex and satisfying, though I wanted a little less interiority and more of their lives outside of their heads. This will be a feature for most readers, I suspect. I have read very, very little New Adult, but I liked this.

Cherry Pie (Mercury Rising Book 1) by Samantha Kane is a contemporary small town male/male romance. I think it was in my TBR because the author has also written historical romance. As usual when I read small town settings, I felt almost as if I was visiting a fantasy world, but I enjoyed the characters, which to me is the whole point of reading a romance. I especially liked the way a past romance came into the story.

Kitty Goes to War (Kitty Norville Book 8) by Carrie Vaughn – I enjoyed this series quite a bit, particularly the intense volume 7, Kitty’s House of Horrors (Book 7). This entry was…okay, I think mostly in comparison with my memories of the previous volume, which would be hard to top for emotional intensity. There were some interesting issues raised about werewolf soldiers, and I wouldn’t mind reading a spinoff about them, should Vaughn ever write one.

Fanfiction:Trust Fall by AlchemyAlice is a sweet probably pre-slash Steve and Tony story. It’s AU; Tony is there when Steve is found, and things fall out differently. Low conflict, pleasing resolution.

For fans of historical Steve and Bucky, there’s a new story in hansbekhart’s Kings County series that’s all about the Barnes family on the home front.

Domenika Marzione wrote some inventive Marvel Comics Alternate Universes. Recursive is a “Life on Mars” homage, in which Captain America is thrown back in time to the period just after Bucky’s death, when he (now) knows Bucky is a captive in Poland. Preserved takes place in the 1950s; Bucky survived but Steve was lost, except now Peggy Carter thinks Steve is The Winter Soldier, and needs Bucky to help her find him.

Team-Building Exercises by Owlet is a series of interconnected one-shots in her post-Winter Soldier universe, with a lot of mission-assists and awww-quotient, plus an appearance by Cat Eleanor.

The Mutant Games by TurtleTotem places characters from X-Men: First Class into an alternate universe version of The Hunger Games. Warning for many character deaths, as you might expect, though some might not be as dead as you think. Despite guessing the likely outcome of the story, I was gripped from beginning to end (and I wasn’t quite right about the ending).

Fanfiction: London Orbital by merripestin (Sherlock) features Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Sally Donovan, and Greg Lestrade trapped together in a car all night, for a case. Snappy dialogue ensues.

October:
Fiction: The Duke of Snow and Apples by Elizabeth Vail is set in an alternate England that has magic, and felt roughly Regency to me in its social mores. It engages with a lot of things people complain about when they read romance, and attempts to do them in a way that’s entertaining (I feel the book was a success at this). The repressed hero is repressed because he thinks his emotionally-linked magic did terrible things to other people; the heroine thinks she is a failure for realistic reasons. The Duke of the title ran away from home (for very good reasons) and has been a footman since the age of 15. He’s assigned to the heroine at a house party, and is intrigued by her because he can tell she’s emotionally hiding. Both of them make mistakes in their relationship, but I felt the problems and their solutions were more sensible than in many romances, so I didn’t mind Obvious Villain Is Obvious. I especially liked that the servants were portrayed thoughtfully, both in worldbuilding details and behavior. There were some inventive uses of magic in the story as well. I’d recommend this if you like to see tropes done well.

Think of England by K. J. Charles – I started reading it while on the elliptical, stayed there for an hour, then continued while waiting for the bus, on the bus, and before I went to bed. I think it’s probably novella length, but I was still satisfied to have finished something. It’s a historical male/male romance with some historical opinions about homosexuality and religion.

Nonfiction: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth – I started reading this for a panel at World Fantasy, not knowing that a scheduling conflict would mean I would end up not being on the panel after all. Regardless, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I had read one biography of Tolkien, but this one focuses on a period of his life that’s usually ignored, and includes his closest friends from his school days. All but one of them were killed in World War One.

Fanfiction: I really enjoyed the characterization in Collected Bones of All Kinds by hansbekhart – it’s two linked Captain America: Winter Soldier stories, one about Bucky and Steve, the other about Sam and Steve. The same author wrote When I Put Away Childish Things featuring Bucky and Steve before WWII was declared, and after Pearl Harbor, which has some nice historical detail.

Fiction: I finally started to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke this month, but ran out of steam, so it’s still not finished. I state that here so I will be ashamed and go back to it, even though to date (May 2015), I still have not. I bought the book when it came out, in hardcover, and because the hardcover is ginormous I could only read it at home. Yes, I know that now there is an e-book. I am stubborn. I bought the hardcover and I am going to read it that way.

Prisoner by Lia Silver was really really fun. It reminded me a bit of the first Marjorie Liu I ever read, Shadow Touch (still my favorite one!), except with more action and less navel-gazing. The hero and heroine are utterly different from that book, and their situation isn’t the same, but anyway, I was reminded of it; something about the intensity of what the characters are dealing with. I loved how tough both hero and heroine were, and how funny the hero is. Bonus points for the heroine’s sister being a romance reader. Also, I get cited in the acknowledgments because of a long-ago music suggestion to the author! Go me!

Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy – I read this as preparation for a Readercon panel. It’s a space opera romance that distinctly reminded me of books I enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s. The genius programmer heroine is abducted into a dangerous situation against her will and is inextricably tied to the mysterious, dangerous hero in such a way that if they get too far apart, he dies. Aaangst!!!

Calculated in Death by J.D. Robb – I was meh on this one, though usually I find this series soothing in its repetitive mediocrity.

Nonfiction: Bogs, Baths and Basins: The Story of Domestic Sanitation by David Eveleigh. This was the best book ever. The author is a docent who got a lot of questions about historical defecation procedures (he didn’t put it quite like that), so he wrote a book (after an incredible amount of research). From this book I learned pretty much everything I ever wanted to know about closets and toilets and baths and showers and piping, all of it backed up (see what I did there?) with information (and lots of illustrations) from period catalogs and various sanitation reports. If you like neepery, you will love this book. It is awesome. You should probably go get a copy now.

A note here – I’ve mostly been listing nonfiction books in the month I started reading them, and combining my thoughts from throughout the time I was actually reading it. But I actually spent months reading some of these nonfiction books.

Fiction: Lessons After Dark by Isabel Cooper was much more a traditional historical romance than its predecessor, No Proper Lady, and for that reason I enjoyed it a lot less.

Nonfiction: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Blanton is really, really dry in style but blew my mind at the same time. There were so many women who fought, for so many reasons and in so many ways, and so much evidence of their presence which was later forgotten or suppressed. There are so many amazing stories in this book; every one could be a novel on its own.

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes is very enlightening, though the style is dry and academic. As one might expect, most of the factual information is drawn from court cases, which may or may not have had anything to do with the actual relationship. The book begins with a marriage between an Irish indentured servant and a Black slave in 1681. This became a court case because by the laws of the time, she and her children were supposed to become slaves upon the marriage, and they did, but then the laws changed and her grandchildren sued for freedom. They lost, but then a great-grandchild sued and won. One of the author’s main points seems to be that lynching culture (and black men being accused of raping white women) didn’t become virulent until after black men gained the right to vote and thus became more of a threat to white men. The last chapters, on Reconstruction and the ensuing torture and murder, are pretty tough going as you might imagine, but the thing that struck me most is how easily I could transfer the events and the arguments to today’s news reports. That made me sad and angry, even though it wasn’t really news to me, because it’s still happening.

Fiction: Emilie and the Hollow World by Martha Wells was a lot of fun, with a spunky heroine, interesting nonhumans, and lots of steampunk. Wells is one of my all-time favorite fantasy authors; this is her first novel specifically aimed at young adults.

Country Heaven by Ava Miles is a contemporary romance about a country singer and a cook. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the Midwestern heroine’s love of the movie Gone With the Wind and the idea that going to a restored plantation house for a fancy dinner that romanticized the past is a fun thing to do, when all I could think about was the slave quarters that were never mentioned. I am not sure if there was a single black person in the entire novel, even when they were in Mississippi with the hero’s upper-crust family. I was clearly not this book’s intended audience.

Fanfiction: Not About Superheroes (A Private Little War) by AnnaFugazzi is Captain America/Iron Man slash that explores how 1930s-1940s-raised Steve Rogers, who’s gay, might (slowly) adapt to modern acceptance of homosexuality in the military and to gay marriage. It’s the first time I’ve seen a detailed exploration of this idea, instead of it being quickly glossed over to get to the romance, or having Steve easily accept every new social change he encounters.

Fiction: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (galley) – I have known the author online for many years, though we’ve only met in person a few times, briefly. I loved this. Straight up loved it. And since now it’s been out a while, you can see from various reviews and award nominations that many others loved it as well, so it’s not just me. It’s rare to find a fantasy in which the hero is not constantly cleaving people with swords. I felt an emotional connection to the protagonist almost immediately, and that carried me throughout. After I finished reading, I pre-ordered the hardcover.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has won many awards, and I liked it for the most part, but was not all that wowed by the creative use of gendered language that so many people wrote about. It did give me some thoughts about colonialism, and the ways colonialism is portrayed in speculative fiction.

The Night Is Mine by M. L. Buchman is romantic suspense with awesome military details and a tough combat-helicopter-pilot heroine who ends up in one of those bizarre situations that come up in romance novels (chef/bodyguard to the First Lady), about which she is very disgruntled. It is first in a series.

The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer is a mystery featuring Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of the famous brother. It didn’t wow me, but I read it out of a vague completist instinct.

Body & Soul by Jordan Castillo Price, third in the PsyCop series, delivered undemanding entertainment and some new twists on the ongoing romance.

Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist by Dorothy Gilman seemed not to have been edited; it was rife with run-on sentences, as if it had been written in a sort of stream of consciousness: thoughts were separated only by commas, and sentences were sometimes not broken up like you would expect them to be. It definitely did not match up to my memories of earlier books in the series.

Fiction: The Marketplace (Book One of The Marketplace Series) by Laura Antoniou – this was a freebie of a well-known book about dominance and submission. I’d read it back when it came out, but didn’t remember much. Anyway, Submission is not my kink, but reading about it in this book is interesting in that it feels like science fiction to me: I’m reading about a culture that is alien to me, and trying to understand the associated emotions of the characters, but I don’t have all the necessary…something…for me to really comprehend what it’s getting at, and how they feel. I’ve had the same experience reading other work in this genre. If you are into D/S and BDSM, I think you might really like this series.

Unhinge the Universe by Aleksandr Voinov and L.A. Witt – not sure how I feel about this one. This was a galley, which I picked up because of the topic: it’s a male/male romance, WWII setting, featuring a US Army interrogator and a young SS soldier. As expected, the concept made this an uncomfortable experience for me, but I was curious what approach the authors would take. They worked on humanizing the German character (more so than the American) and making him into an individual with human emotions, etc., which was fine and what I’d expected, but I kept running up against, “SS. He’s in the SS,” thoughts, despite the fact that it’s explained he joined that branch because his brother was already in the Wehrmacht, he’s proud of his country, blah, blah. Also, the interrogator was inappropriate (in a military sense) towards him more than once, which I guess was necessary because otherwise there would be no romance, but I was still twitchy about it, and not in a sexy way. So, an uncomfortable experience.

Nonfiction: Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies is focused on the 13th century, which is interesting not only for its subject matter but for what I learned about how that period was researched. The authors used a combination of specific types of documents and archaeological method, with occasional anthropological comparison to later and earlier periods.

I haven’t posted anything substantive in this blog in a really long time! Sorry about that.

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing, but as usual when not writing much, I have been reading, and I’ve been logging that reading, after a fashion. I’ve decided to post my off-the-cuff commentaries in manageable chunks For Your Pleasure. These posts are going to have a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, and fanfiction.

September 2013
Fiction: Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik, latest in the Temeraire series, which I enjoyed despite being braced for a cliffhanger-ish ending (which I got). I think we visited Shogun while the characters were in Japan, a book I haven’t read but have heard a lot about, then they went to China and Russia. One more Temeraire book to go, sigh. I will miss those characters!The Maker’s Mask (The Books Of Requite Book 1) by Ankaret Wells – the heroine/pov character is a geeky engineer trying to navigate among all these gorgeous fantasy creatures swanning around with swirly capes and swords. There is some interesting stuff with gender which I won’t spoil here.

Fanfiction: Thaw by Domenika Marzione, who writes military-inflected stories; it’s a sequel to her story Freezer Burn and puts the Winter Soldier movie arc into her version of The Avengers continuity.

October 2013
Fiction: Mounting Danger by Karis Walsh, a lesbian romance with horse and polo and mounted police neepery, which was fun. The author did a great job of integrating the horse stuff with all the other aspects of the plot. I was amused by how one of the characters, Cal, was typically rich and rakish, the other a former foster kid, very upright and rulebound. I did a preview of this one for Heroes and Heartbreakers.

Nonfiction: The Women Who Wrote the War: The Compelling Story of the Path-breaking Women War Correspondents of World War II by Nancy Caldwell Sorel – I had read practically nothing about World War II before, though I have a few books on the To Be Read. This book skips between the various women as it advances forward in time, so I frequently had to remind myself who each person was, mainly because I read it in small segments. I really enjoyed reading about the variety of roles women played in war journalism, and how they worked with and around rules to accomplish things.Edwardian Life and Leisure by Ronald Pearsall – a recommendation from, I think, Evangeline Holland. It had a lot of good information, but his coverage of the suffrage movement was rather…annoying, I will say.

Fanfiction: User Since by rageprufrock, a very meta story about an online discussion group for fans of Captain America, and the participation of Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D..

After this, my log jumps forward to February 2014, so I’ll start there next time.

I read a fair amount of recent Young Adult and Middle Grade books over the last year. These are some of my favorites, in no particular order.

Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall is a YA fantasy involving five sisters who find a body floating in the Rio Grande. Their father has recently run out on their mother, and it happens that their paternal grandmother, whom they haven’t seen in some time, lives near where the dead man came from. They worry the dead man’s family won’t know what became of him, and end up making a trip to Mexico to bring him home, a journey which has magical elements akin to The Odyssey. The characters are really vivid and appealing – all five sisters have distinctive personalities, not just the eldest who’s narrating.

For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund is a science fictional retelling of Persuasion. I loved the characters and their complex problems, and the worldbuilding gave rise to a whole host of interesting conflicts that I wouldn’t mind seeing further explored in future books, because their world and their class system is in flux. Plus there are Science Conflicts. However, I don’t think that particular Austen book can work very well with teenagers, even in a world where they have to grow up quickly, so I was less invested in that aspect. Your mileage may vary on that.

Goblin Secrets by William Alexander is secondary world fantasy, Middle Grade, and very page-turny. I loved the intriguing ways the author used masks both in the worldbuilding and thematically. Also the dustfish. It has elements of Baba Yaga, and steampunk, and of course goblins, who seem to fill the role that traveling folk have in our world. (Somewhat gypsies, somewhat traveling actors, but with other elements as well; they are all fascinating individuals.) And after the satisfying ending, there are a few small mysteries still unsolved.

Iron Hearted Violet by Kelly Regan Barnhill is MG – note for younger readers, it has some serious scariness when the queen falls ill after a miscarriage. It has an unusual heroine, a not-beautiful princess. The story is told well and with a number of interesting narrative and pov choices; it comes together as feeling like a new fairy tale. The narrator is the royal storyteller, ostensibly, but there is some omniscient going on. Cool worldbuilding includes a mirrored sky and dragons who must store their hearts outside of their bodies. Both the male and female lead characters have a good bit of agency.

Passion Blue by Victoria Strauss is historical YA (Renaissance Italy), with a slight speculative element that is real to the narrator but may not be objectively real (I think it’s intended to be real, but you can read it either way). The heroine has been essentially sold into a convent and desperately wants out so she can marry as her mother (a nobleman’s mistress) had hoped for her. But inside the convent, there is a rare thing, a painting studio. The heroine happens to be an artist and loves drawing more than anything. I really loved the outcome of this story, and the decisions the heroine made. Also, there was some excellent art-neep.

Cat Girl’s Day Off by Kimberly Pauley is fun, humorous fluff in which lots of people have weird psychic gifts; the narrator’s is that she can understand what cats are saying, and have them understand her. Since her mother and sister are geniuses, and her other sister has multiple gifts, and her dad has a really cool gift, Natalie feels somewhat shortchanged, but not in a bitter way. I actually wanted more story about her family. The plot involves a remake of “Ferris Bueller” and a celebrity blogger and Natalie’s friends, one an aspiring actress and the other a celebrity gossip hound. Blessedly, the romance element is minor, and very well-done.